Jim Rogers’ PhD-thesis at Dublin City University was recently published under the title “The Death & Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age” at Bloomsbury/London. He interviewed 30 music business professionals in the UK and Ireland from 2007 to 2010 to answer the main research question if the Internet caused a crisis in the music industry that is signalling its final collapse or if it, in contrast, resulted in an intensive restructuring and reordering within the industry.

He concludes that the music industry has not undergone a fundamental structural upheaval but was reshaped by an evolutionary change. Rogers observes more continuities than discontinuities in the music industry and states that most of the music industry actors do more or less the same things but in a different way. In the following I highlight how the author comes to such a conclusion.

The new issue of the International Journal of Music Business Research is now online. You can read an article by Michael Huber on “Music Reception in the Digital Age – Empirical Research on New Patterns of Music Behaviour” based on a representative survey of music consumption in Austria. In the article “Analysing the Popular Music Audience. Determinants of Participation and Frequency of Attendance” Juan Montoro-Pons et al. show that concert attendance in Spain is driven by by cultural capital accumulated through media participation. Finally, John Fangjun Li highlights the tremendously growing digital music industry in China in a contribution entitled “The Development of the Digital Music Industry in China during the First Decade of the 21st Century with Particular Regard to Industrial Convergence”.